Offline Dating Diaries: January

It’s 2026; new year, new me as they say. I delete all my dating apps and decide to date purely IRL.

Maybe it’s a social experiment, maybe it’s just an idea for a blog post. And that’s a secret she’ll never tell.

Either way, the tapped “remove app” icons on my iPhone (for Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, Feeld, and HER) must have emitted some energy into the universe–a few days later I get a text from my friend Laura. Laura has met a woman in her yoga class who she thinks is perfect for me.

“She’s also from LA, she’s also Jewish, she’s a stand-up comedian, she’s gay. You guys will totally get along.”

It sounds bashert (Hebrew for “meant to be”), so I say yes.

***

Naomi* and I decide to meet up at The Grove on a Saturday afternoon. After I park, I see her across the street and briefly do that thing female brains do: imagine a rose-tinted montage of us having a perfect date which never ends because we keep alternating between talking and fucking and talking and fucking, which ends in marital bliss and me dropping my phone into the ocean forever.

I could finally be one of those smug, coupled individuals who responds to first-date horror stories with the likes of, “Ugh, I cannot imagine being single right now. The dating scene sounds awful. I’m so glad I fell in love two years ago.” (PS if you say this to single people, you are now contractually obligated to have a divorce which takes ten years in court and another decade off your life, xoxo).

Naomi is cute–tall, which is important for me since I’m 5”9. She’s wearing cargo pants and a t-shirt. I am also wearing cargo pants and a t-shirt.

The only other things Laura told me about Naomi is that her parents are huge entertainment attorneys, she’s “kind of” a nepo baby, that she and both her parents went to Yale, and that she is really, really into comedy. As it would turn out, this is all I would hear about for the next three interminable hours.

I don’t remember how or when it began, but maybe our horrible conversation is like Hell itself: eternally always already there, such that you cannot place an exact moment of temporal origin.

As we careen down Rick Caruso’s simulacra of a walkable European city, Naomi begins telling me about the trials and travails of growing up in the shadow of her “very powerful, very wealthy, very successful mother.” I remembered chapstick, but I seemed to have forgotten my world’s tiniest violin for this date.

“Gisele Bündchen* was a big part of my 16th birthday,” she says, before telling me about how the Dodgers gave pitching lessons to everyone for her brother’s 15th. There are stories upon stories about all the famous people she met because of who her parents represented in Hollywood. I hear maybe an hour of these anecdotes before she asks me a question, or even takes a breath to let me respond.

“So you’re in school?” she asks.

“Yeah, I’m getting my PhD in Literature. Do you like to read?” I ask.

“I’ve tried to read stuff. I bought The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith. I was reading the first chapter but then I was like ‘Wait, what am I doing with my time? I could be watching TV right now.’ I just watched TV instead and haven’t picked it back up. I just hate silence. Silence is the enemy.”

Oh, I thought. The image of us under a chuppah and making charcuterie boards with lox and herring in our marital home suddenly vanished from my mind, like the crisp outline of pictures on a roll of film fading in a pile of bleach.

While I do not require lovers and partners to have the same undying passion for literature that I possess, I do not see a lot of compatibility with people who experience existential dread from reading, and then solve said dread by watching TV. Watching TV is actually the thing that besets me with that feeling of “what the fuck am I doing with my time?”

I also do not think silence is the enemy. Silence is my best friend. I am not a “playing TV in the background” kind of person. I cherish silence like a lover. Perhaps my only one.

I worry an awkward silence might play out, since I have no response to her orphaned copy of The Price of Salt.

But no, of course, she has many more tales. The next two hours feel like an episode in some show that’s trying to parody the horriblest stereotypes of Los Angeles. Naomi mentions having lost a job recently (details vague) and how she now assistant-assistant produces Gwyneth Paltrow’s* podcast.

“Gwyneth is a long-time family friend, so when I lost my job I just texted her and asked if there’s anything I could do for her.”

Oh, I thought again. She’s on a first name basis with Ms. Paltrow. I then realized that she was really unbelievably well-connected, and was still vaguely employed and doing stand-up in the same venues I performed in during undergrad. There are people far less connected than her in far better positions than assistant-assistant-producing a podcast and still looking for real work.

****

My confusion is answered by our next scene in the “terrible LA date” episode of whatever cliche sitcom my life has become: she begins reading off her stand-up bits from her Notes app to me. She is doing this by The Grove in front of a coffee cart while holding a matcha.

Whenever I laugh, she seems annoyed. I’m not sure what else I’m supposed to be doing when someone ambushes me with their five-minute set on a first date, besides running away. The jokes aren’t bad per se. But I can see how the sort of sheltered vibe she has as the daughter of a “very wealthy, very powerful, very successful mother” would not do well on stage for the masses. At least, not without her being self-aware of her life and vibe.

She then tells me a story about how one time her mother sent a clip of her stand-up to some writers from Arrested Development*. They responded to Naomi’s mom, “Wow, she’s really got chops!”

I say, “wow, that’s awesome!” and she goes briefly frustrated and silent. This dynamic has been going on this whole date: she seems really dissatisfied and annoyed with however I respond to her stories.

She’ll tell me about how hard it is to grow up in her mother’s shadow; if I respond with an “aw, I’m sorry,” she’ll roll her eyes and say it’s just part of her life.

If she tells me some wild story about how Jennifer Aniston* changed her diaper as a baby, I respond with a “wow, that’s so wild,” to which she quickly interrupts me in an annoyed huff with another story. I don’t know what she wants.

I laugh at her jokes, which seems to annoy her. I give her sympathy for her sad stories, which bothers her. I respond with awe and surprise at her coolest stories, and this vexes her.

Sometimes I respond with meaningful content to her anecdotes, which also seems to bore or irritate her. But she just keeps going anyway, always pre-annoyed with whatever I have to say.

I feel like her mother’s assistants probably felt when babysitting Naomi as a child: panicked, unable to please this endlessly unpleased girl. If I share an anecdote about myself, she purses her lips in frustration or stares out into the abyss, before returning to yet another tale of the time Chris Rock* read her a bedtime story or Julia Roberts* attended her middle school graduation party.

I realize now what Laura meant by saying that Naomi is “kind of” a nepo baby. It would be a great title for a memoir, which maybe Naomi could successfully write if she had any amount of self-awareness. I think hearing her life story of failing to reap the fruits of her nepotism because she can’t really hack it talent-wise would be endearing, if told with a certain level of self-consciousness and deprecation. Only she expresses none of that.

Speaking of memoirs, Naomi is now telling me an exact play-by-play of her high school years.

“Well you know I was just trying to do everything I could to get into an Ivy. I took a million APs and joined the tennis team.”

“Oh cool, what other stuff did you do?” I asked.

“Well the APs and tennis team took a lot of time. Those are really time-consuming things.”

I know, like anyone raised with any amount of privilege in any major American city, that taking a bunch of APs and being on the tennis team does not qualify you for an Ivy. It hardly even qualifies you for NYU or UCSB anymore. Then I realized: oh yeah, she’s a double legacy.

She continues on a long tangent about how she studied so much in high school, but it was all so she could “do whatever I could do to stand out to admissions.”

Honey, I wanted to reply, you already did the most important thing: had two parents who also went to Yale. It’s interesting that she was transparent about how her connections got her Gwyneth Paltrow, but not Yale.

Maybe she wanted to maintain the illusion that at some point, she had autonomously earned something? Or maybe gaining admissions through being a legacy generates a sort of false-logic: Well, I did get in, and I did study hard, so who’s to say why I really got in? It was mostly me, with my parents as an added bonus.

I let her live in her delusion, which might be another great title for her memoir if the superiorly talented nepo baby Cassie David didn’t already write a memoir with a similar title.

***

Fortunately, my parking is about to run out. Everyone thinks the parking limitations in LA make the city a terrible place to live. WRONG! “Ah, well, my meter is about to run out,” is a great way to get out of a terrible date. It’s like having a baby at home for the childless.

“Just come to my place,” she offers. “There’s tons of free parking in front of my apartment, I’ll text you the address.”

Of course I went on a date with the one person with the one block of free parking in the Beverly Grove neighborhood. I wish Rick Caruso had made this simulation of a quaint European town more realistic and a crusader drunk on meade would accidentally impale me with a rapier.

I walk back to my car. A fantasy plays in my mind: I just fucking leave. I don’t waste another minute with this person. Sorry, not to be a total fucking bitch, she wasn’t evil or anything. But sometimes I just feel like my life is a series of hitting stop signs of very draining people like this.

In my head, I’m a girl boss who is ruthless with her time and will leave any date if given the opportunity–and even if not. I’ve had the fantasy of escaping certain dates under the guise of a “bathroom visit,” slipping a waitress $25 for my share of the bill, and disappearing into the night like a beautifully selfish fog.

I don’t really do that. It feels too mean. I go up to her apartment, where the sexual tension is handed to me like a gift I didn’t ask for and also don’t like. I hold it in my hands, cringe-smiling, wondering if the store has a lax exchange policy.

I think about fucking her anyway because sometimes my brain is run by a very gross horny man who is actually kind of turned on by annoying women, aroused by my quasi-hatred of them, but I cannot philip roth maxx here. My unspoken goal of 2026 is to stop doing toxic sexual shit, which thus far has meant no sex. I mean we’re only a month in, but still. In 2025, there was a lot of sex and a lot of it should have had a prop 65 warning.

***

We chat more on her couch. I learn that her parents’ house has a dry sauna, a steam room, a bowling alley, and a full-time private chef.

Naomi interrupts herself to ask me about my family’s background. She doesn’t ask another question, seemingly satisfied by my ancestral heritage and then moving on to an entire history of her paternal grandmother’s cruel treatment of her, her own fluency in Italian and Korean, her recent trips to Napoli and Seoul (both pronounced with accents I will let you imagine).

I ask about what she did there, how she learned Korean and Italian, if she understands the local dialects. She answers, she answers, she answers. I mention that I taught abroad in Serbia for a year; she nods stiffly and lets a silence linger before launching into more information about her travels, her cat, her family.

Sometimes I get the sense that these people are craving an applausive audience for their performance of self, and so I go along with it. So when she tells me about how she taught herself a language, I just say, “you’re such a self starter” but I cannot even eke out applause because she interrupts it and keeps going. In fact, when she says something that I assume is trying to garner an impressed tone–she still seems dissatisfied.

WHAT DOES SHE WANT FROM ME?

The times I try for something more substantive, she also seems irritated and interrupts me. I realize that basically, I am not supposed to talk. She is like that video of Lea Michele auditioning for Glee, where she gets annoyed at the audience for clapping or laughing, because even this affirmation of her performance interrupts it. Anyway, Naomi is still giving me the entire history of her family from all sides and ends.

I think her ideal partner might be mute. A realistic one might be deaf.

Oh, and apparently her and her cat take the same Prozac.

“Yeah, the Prozac for cats is the same as the Prozac for humans, so every morning Kitty and I take our 100mg with coconut water.”

Los Angeles is actually an amazing city. Fuck you all who say otherwise! I am struck with a desire to tell her that this is the kind of stuff she needs to use for her stand-up, in a self-aware way, but I have a feeling it wouldn’t go over well. She tells me about the Prozac without a hint of irony or humor.

Finally, I get to leave. We both pretend we want to see each other for a second date and never speak again.

Mutual post-first date ghosting provides the kind of relief I imagine heroin does.

***

Later that day I took a walk with a close friend who told me a story about a date she went on recently. Her date Tommy*, like my nepo girl, talked about himself endlessly but at least had the self-awareness to occasionally say: “Sorry I’m just talking about myself, I want to hear about you.” When he forced himself to ask my friend one question about herself she, “Literally saw the light leave his eyes and zone out as I was speaking.”

She had thought to herself in a panic, “I was just like, fuck am i this boring? So I’d just hurry up talking so he could talk again because I felt so bad.”

I told her: u are not boring! U had a bad interlocutor!

I get the sense that maybe the people who do this just really need to express themselves. I don’t really know what else it could be.

A few weeks later (spoiler alert) I cave and redownload Hinge. Naomi is recommended to me on Hinge as a “Very Compatible” match. And the gag is, I totally would have sent her my weekly rose! On paper, we were perfect–very compatible. But it would have sucked.

And so then, a death field anxiety surrounds me. My friends are wrong, real life set-ups are wrong, and the app is wrong. The app, I now know, is definitionally wrong. It is sending me into the arms of people who are wrong for me, and I them.

A terrifying circular logic: I now know I cannot trust the apps, and I cannot trust real life. Had she and I just met off Hinge and had a terrible date, I would have wondered: maybe if we had met more organically she’d be less performative, less self-absorbed? But no. The set-ups are bad, the apps are bad.

Is there some other plane of existence I can meet women through?

***

Two weeks later, my close friend Lily sets me up with her college friend Wendy. Wendy has just moved to LA for law school. We meet briefly at a house party. There, Wendy and I have a nice, okay conversation.

She tells me about why she chose law school, what kind of lawyer she wants to be, how LA compares to where she grew up. She’s far less obnoxious and much more likeable than Naomi (not a high bar) but the conversation feels like a sort of pleasant water cooler chat with an inoffensive co-worker.

I asked a lot of questions about clerkships and internships, etc. I learned about a big trip she took to celebrate getting into law school, her high school experience. I don’t really think she learned anything about me. That being said, she is really pretty and very kind, so we swap numbers and I figure that a real date might provide more chemistry.

The issue I’m running into is this: I know that if I want to not only date, but find the love of my life and get married, I need to say yes to dates and set ups.

But also, the more bad dates I go on, the more burned out and jaded I get. And it’s not that I expect every date to lead to love and marriage immediately. If I go out with someone but it’s still fun and enjoyable but maybe not a love connection, I genuinely really don’t mind. I have a positive attitude about dates, which is that the good but not great ones are at least a fun way to see the city and pass an afternoon.

My issue is that I have a lot of dates which are bad. Like, this would not even be an acquaintanceship. I now have so many funny, bad first date stories I’m ready to fire whatever room of bitchy screenwriters is up there making up my life. I WOULD LIKE MY LIFE TO BE A LITTLE MORE NOTEBOOK, AND A LITTLE LESS SEINFELD. IN CASE ANYONE IS TAKING NOTES. THANK YOU!

***

I have a confession to make, one that might be more or less apparent from my Femcel pen name. I am rabidly, painfully horny like 80% of the time. It was only in the last year that it went from 100 to 80. My old therapist told me I probably have higher testosterone than the average woman; people act like I should have been offended by that comment.

For me, it was really validating. I have a hard time relating to a lot of women, who say shit like “Yeah, I haven’t had sex in about six months.” Bitch, I would literally be eating the fucking dry wall in my apartment. I would need a rabies shot.

I know there are freaky, horny, rabid women out there. That’s who this blog is for. Also anyone who isn’t horny but enjoys watching me like a wild animal in a zoo cage.

My therapist also said (more so of my masturbation addiction) that it provides a high level of serotonin and dopamine that no other activity will provide unless I train my brain to do so.

I’m deficient in dopamine. Or maybe I’m just deficient.

And here’s the thing: I am not ashamed of my dire, life-threatening need for sex. To me, it really feels like any other bodily need: hunger, thirst, having to pee. I am not ashamed by the need to pee or eat, but holy fuck is it annoying to have those needs when there’s nowhere to piss and nothing in the fridge. That’s how it feels when I am this horny.

On Thursday, my philosophy professor talks about the desire to have “the body without organs.” Motherfucker, you’re telling me!!!

***

So anyway, back to my experiment of dating offline. I have a date set up with Wendy for next weekend.

I go to a lot of social events within the graduate school community on my campus but they’re worthless for meeting partners. Most of the women are straight and the ones who aren’t are nerds who like Dungeons and Dragons and Magic the Gathering.

Call me a bitch or a mean girl–I take both as compliments–but nothing makes me go softer than millennial geek shit. It would take all the Viagra in the world for me to get it up to fuck a Board Game Night Lesbian or Guy Who Really Loves and Exclusively Reads Philip K. Dick.

Fortunately, these people do not need me because that D&D/sci-fi/fantasy/Magic The Gathering crowd is a lot like a European royal family: they’re all incestuously fucking each other.

Graduate school socials are filled with guys who basically have the attitude of “I can’t even look at my dick until I’ve invented a new chemical/written a book which revolutionizes our understanding of Greek Art/changes the American mind on Marxism”;

meanwhile here I am, feeling quite the opposite: I cannot do any of these things until someone looks at my clit.

It’s taking me four minutes to read every page because my mind drifts off to sex every other minute. I cannot stop these erotic ruminations. (Would erotic ruminations be a good title for my band or my memoir?). I’m thinking about fucking all the time.

It’s literally that Seinfeld episode where Elaine goes a week without sex and all the stupidity of the body clogs her mind, but George goes a week without sex and without the distraction, he becomes a genius.

Fuck being a Carrie or a Charlotte, are you an Elaine or a George?

I am an Elaine to the max. I am literally unable to think at my best capacity unless I am getting fucked. Now, it’s been five months and I am about to become so stupid and unfocused and illiterate I just become a cavewoman in search of sex like a life-sustaining, promethean fire.

There is a guy in the Computer Science department who I thought was really cute, and intellectual.

My type in men is anyone who looks almost exactly like my father: big nose, hairy chest, talks extremely fast (like a podcast set at 2.0x speed) about anything ranging from mathematical principles to legal philosophy to theology. This CS guy checks all those boxes, but unfortunately, not the most important one: being normal/liberal.

Ironically, we have a very intellectually charged two hour long discussion, far past the end date of a dinner party we both attended. It does feel very grad school, like we’re merely two minds floating in the air, speaking without talking, purely mind to mind with no bodies.

We talk about math and whether or not it’s discovered or invented by man, if the purpose of art is to have a moral or exist for its own sake, if there was a historical Moses or if the Exodus story was merely a guilt response to Moses’s followers killing him in the desert (Freud). I feel that we had, perhaps erotically so, transcended the plane of human existence. We are just two intellects intellect-ing for the sake of intellection.

I am brought back down to earth when the conversation switches to politics. All that needs to be said is this: his political views are consistent with someone in a CS department. Mine are consistent with someone in an English department. I am a human woman with a human body and the real world is still here. He is unfuckable and I am unfucked.

HHHHEEEEELLLLLLPPPPPPPP!!!!!!!!!

Everyone always gets taught in school about dying from sex: STDs, pregnancy, blah blah.

BUT WHY DOES NO ONE TALK ABOUT THE ALTERNATIVE WHICH I AM CURRENTLY EXPERIENCE: DYING FROM NO SEX!!?!?!?!!!!!!!?!???!!!!

I am being held hostage by my sex drive, like this bitch is literally in a latex catsuit holding a knife to my brainstem like bitch if u don’t get fingered in the next week im going to take an eye out.

******

Coming next week– Apps-free dating diary: February

In this upcoming episode:

1. I do finally get to finger someone

2. I leave a room to cry alone about the fact that I haven’t had sex in almost 6 months.

3. I possibly redownload a dating app. So much for resolutions!

xoxo,

femcel